Monday, May 9 2005 08:40 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Baghdad: Iraq's new Cabinet was barely in place yesterday (May 8, 2005) before one of the newly appointed Ministers quit, the latest in a string of mishaps for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's Government of "national unity".

The US military, meanwhile, announced that seven of its soldiers were killed in a series of bomb attacks over the weekend.

Parliament approved the line-up against a backdrop of renewed violence as insurgents gunned down a senior civil servant in Baghdad and a suicide bomber killed at least two Iraqi soldiers after ploughing his car into their convoy in central Iraq.

The attacks followed a massive explosion in Baghdad on Saturday (May 7, 2005) on a three-car convoy. Two of the 18 killed were American security guards working for CTU Consulting, the firm said.

The US military said three marines and a sailor were killed on Saturday night after being attacked by a car driven by a suicide bomber in Hadithah, 260 km northwest of Baghdad.

A soldier was killed yesterday by an explosion during a patrol near Samarra, north of the capital, and two more service personnel, assigned to a marine division, were also killed in an explosion near Khalidiyah, west of Baghdad.

The violence over the weekend brought the death toll nationwide to at least 250 in eight days.

Just hours after Parliament approved the final slate of six Cabinet Ministers put forward by Jaafari after months of bitter haggling between Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis, newly-named Human Rights Minister Hashem Ashibli resigned.

"I was surprised when I heard in the media that I had been appointed as Human Rights Minister to represent the Sunni community," Ashibli told a press conference, saying he objected to what he described as a Cabinet chosen on sectarian lines.

Ashibli was one of nine Sunnis appointed to the 36-member Cabinet in a bid to broaden its appeal and compensate for the community's under-representation in Parliament following a low Sunni turnout in the January 30 elections.

Jaafari appointed a Sunni, Saadun al-Dulaimi, to head the key Defence Ministry. Sunni Arab industry and electricity Ministers were also named, along with a Sunni deputy Premier.

Dulaimi, from the western town of Ramadi, a center of the insurgency, was an officer in Saddam Hussein's Army, who went into exile during the Iran-Iraq war, turned sociologist and returned home to head his own research institute.

Another all important post, the oil Ministry, went to Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, son of a prominent Shiite cleric, who previously held the post in the interim administration appointed by US-led forces in September 2003.

The United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite bloc that won more than half of Parliament seats and holds 18 portfolios, dominates the new Cabinet.

The embattled Prime Minister also vowed to combat the surge in violence with "all legal means, including emergency laws if necessary".

The Iraqi Government announced yesterday that the arrest of a senior member of al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network. Ammar Adnan Mohammad Hamza Zubaidi, alias Abu Abbas, was arrested on Thursday (May 5, 2005) in a Baghdad district, it said.